Breakfast in the park today. A thermos of rose tea and a couple of slices of my homemade beetroot date and carrot cake. What a creature of habit I’ve become. How easily I attach myself to ways of being. I notice that I always circle the park from the right, up and then down. So today I walk to the left. Down and then up. Immediately the decision feels meaningful. I’d been trying to stay with my feelings of separation and loss. But my body has been saying something else to me, something much less adult. Down to something more primordial. There is a screaming and wailing, loud in me. A lostness and a need to be foundness. Now I’m trying to come back up. To find myself again and I’m not sure I can do this on my own. There’s some memory in me that tells me I should be able to work this through alone. At the same time my experience of working with children who’ve experienced early attachment and separation trauma presents itself to me. When I was working with my young clients I would give myself to them as an instrument for change. It’s essential and tender work. Always in it a sense of deep longing. A silent voice that speaks of physical holding. Of a warmth and acceptance that comes from connection with another. I am reminded of the footage of the Romanian orphans recued in 2009. Victims of extreme neglect. They appear to be trapped inside themselves. Inside. How clever of them to hold themselves when there was nobody else to hold them, but the cost has been so dear because the holding has become a holding in. The containing edge has become a prison. I speak of this because there is something of this in the ending of a significant relationship for me. It was a relationship filled with potentiality. There was a promise contained of actual holding from the outside and it was never realised. This is what I’m feeling and if I listen to what my body is doing there’s definitely a feeling of my life being endangered. A bolting down of the hatches that happens so quickly and imperceptibly. When I experience this my skin flares-up. I feel like one of those transformer toys. Everything’s hardening and clicking shut and there isn’t time to negotiate or reverse the process. It’s ancient and I have to just allow it. But each time, I am observing the mechanism a bit more. I am my own experiment and this will inform my work with children in the future when I am more healed. So I’m in the park again with all the ones. Good morning to all of my sorrows and I see that joy is always close by. The girls and boys are not part of this story. They’re not part of the rhyme because they are never together. I seldom see more than two at a time. So I’m constantly starting again. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy” over and over again and each time I travel a little further, I feel a little bit more something… Today's song "No,I regret nothing!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRCYEkA0_q8 Highlight link and right click http://lyricstranslate.com/en/non-je-ne-regrette-rien-no-i-regret-nothing.html#ixzz3pr3Kfj3J No, absolutely nothing No, I regret nothing Neither the good that’s been done to me, Nor the bad; it is all the same! No, absolutely nothing, No, I regret nothing. It is paid for, swept up, forgotten I don’t give a damn about the past! With my memories I lit up the fire. My shame, my pleasures, I no longer need them. Swept up love affairs, And all of their faltering, Swept up forever, I start again from scratch No, absolutely nothing No, I regret nothing. Neither the good that has been done to me, Nor the bad; it is all the same No, absolutely nothing, No, I regret nothing. Because my life, because my joy, Today, start with you.